From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably.

Though A Short History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel (albeit without a plot). Each longish chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as “The Size of the Earth” and “Life Itself.” Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author of Life and Trilobite) and these interviews are charming. But it’s when Bryson dives into some of science’s best and most embarrassing fights–Cope vs. Marsh, Conway Morris vs. Gould–that he finds literary gold.

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Well, when I saw the title of the book – I thought it will be indeed a short history of nearly everything but as I started reading, I realized that it’s not at all short history instead it’s a history of nearly everything.

What we learn in this book is apart from science is how insane or competitive were the scientist who invented most of the things in science. As titled suggested ‘A Short History of nearly everything’ not everything is covered in this book, for example philosophy, religion, economics, politics, medicines, computers etc. What actually covered in this book is – physics, atoms, big bang, quantum physics, gravitation, (so-called) evolution, dinosaurs etc.

What you learn reading this book is – what you should have learnt as a student of science. This book answers many question which we wanted to know as a child when we were in school, for example – how on earth scientist know exactly the weight of earth or how the figured to weight of atoms or how the knew the atom can be divided into quarks etc.

Overall a pretty good read for anyone who wants to know about science and beware it’s not short history – the book is very dense and you might need some long reading hours to complete it.